People in most organizations communicate with one another by exchanging email (electronic mail) messages. Since users receive a large number of email messages on a daily basis, there is a constant need to efficiently organize and display the email messages in a manner useful to the user. One way to organize the email messages is by grouping related email messages into email threads. For instance, email messages having the same subject can be determined to be related to one another and grouped into an email thread. In this manner, all the email messages in the user's mailbox can be organized into email threads.
Oftentimes, a user may consider a particular email thread to be important to the user. Current email clients allow a user to flag a particular important email message for later reference. However, the flagging is done on a per-message basis and does not take into consideration whether the message being flagged belongs to a thread, much less, whether the thread is important to the user. Consequently, there is a need for the user to be able to mark a particular thread as important such that user can be notified when an incoming email message belonging to the important thread is received.